JoMaHe Sailing Yacht

JoMaHe Sailing Yacht, a Sepia sailboat bought by Hermann before he had sailed under his own power, embodies the family’s passage from his sudden maritime ambition to its practical undoing. Named from the first two letters of Joachim, Martin, and Hermann, the boat becomes both the object of a shared family project and the setting for a failed sailing exam, a dangerous accident, and a private act of loyalty. After Hermann’s son is knocked overboard and rescued, the boat is never boarded by Hermann again.

The boat imagined before it was learned

Hermann’s desire for a sailboat arrives in a sudden, conspicuous rush. His family finds him flushed and trembling in his armchair, insisting that he wants to sail, raise a spinnaker, and leave the land behind. The decisive first step might have been to test that dream against his experience: he had never sailed, and his only previous trip on the water had been an excursion steamer to Helgoland with the narrator. Instead, the family follows a different route, one that gives the dream a physical form before Hermann has acquired the skill to manage it.

He joins the Schleswiger Schlei-Segel-Club and secures a coveted berth while he still owns no boat and has yet to go out on the water. His new sailing clothes—a white pair of trousers, blue shoes, and a white V-neck sweater with an anchor emblem—make the empty space between the other boats look like a place already claimed. He proudly displays his club card and spends weekends in his armchair wearing the outfit, practicing knots with a piece of rope. The berth, clothes, and practice rope turn the aspiration into a performance of readiness, although the experience needed to make it real is still missing.

Hermann also enrolls himself and the narrator’s mother for the sailing examination. He quizzes her on technical material such as how to calculate hull speed, while she prefers to concentrate on what the test requires. Their sailing course brings the difference between study and experience into view. On his first practical outing Hermann feels seasick and is comfortable only while sitting, whereas the narrator’s mother is exhilarated by the air, the speed, and the unfamiliar view of their city from the water. Hermann nevertheless retains his confidence and continues to quiz her about weather signs.

A purchase, a name, and an examination

Hermann repeatedly misses sailing lessons because he is more interested in finding a boat. An advertisement in a newly subscribed sailing magazine leads him to a relatively inexpensive cabin dinghy called the Sepia. It has standing headroom of one metre seventy, a keel, and an outboard motor; what settles the choice are the advertised claims that it cannot capsize and cannot sink. There are only five boats of this type. Before either Hermann or the narrator’s mother has earned a sailing certificate, one is brought from Cologne to Schleswig on a trailer by its boatbuilder. At the harbor, Hermann stands with his knees locked and watches the boat arrive. The club members have never heard of a Sepia.

The family disputes what to call it until the narrator’s mother proposes combining the first two letters of Joachim, Martin, and Hermann. The resulting name, JoMaHe, makes the boat a compact family emblem. It is lifted into the water by crane and christened with a small bottle of sparkling wine; the bottle leaves a small dent in the plastic hull. The name and the dent belong to the boat from its first launch: family invention is immediately inscribed on its material surface.

Two months later, the sailing examination exposes how little book knowledge can guarantee on open water. Hermann completes the theoretical portion first and passes with no errors; the narrator’s mother also passes, with four. The practical test takes place in strong wind, at seven on the Beaufort scale. In yellow oilskins, life jackets, and red wool hats, the applicants are sent out in pairs. Once Hermann and the narrator’s mother leave the shelter of the harbor wall, the wind heels the boat over. Hermann slips on the wet boards, is struck by the boom as he tries to rise, and falls again when the boat hits a pontoon. The narrator’s mother brings the dinghy under control and handles the next maneuvers alone while Hermann remains on the floorboards, then sits up and vomits into the Schlei Bay.

When a gust pulls the halyard through Hermann’s hands and the sail drops, the narrator’s mother climbs the mast to thread the line back in, despite the wind having strengthened to eight or nine. She raises the sail, steers the boat back to the harbor, and docks it properly. Hermann crawls out and walks unsteadily toward the boathouse without speaking. Of the eighteen candidates in nine boats, he is the only one to fail: the examiner cannot pass someone who spent most of the test lying down and might have needed rescuing without his wife. The contrast is stark: Hermann’s spotless theory paper cannot substitute for composure and competent action aboard JoMaHe.

Calm-water outings and the end of sailing

For weeks after the examination, Hermann does not take the family out. When he eventually does, it is under the narrator’s mother’s command. His preferred trips with the narrator are those on windless mornings, when no sail needs to be raised. He checks the linden trees from bed; if their leaves hang still, he calls it sailing weather. The outboard motor carries them across mirror-flat water while they sun themselves, eat provisions, tell stories, and sometimes fish. On these excursions the boat offers Hermann a gentler version of the maritime life he had imagined, one driven by a motor rather than by wind or sailing skill.

The same outings also give him a way to avoid recognition. If his binoculars reveal someone from the Rotary Club, he calls attention to the sighting and the pair hides in a quiet cove. JoMaHe thus serves not only as transport but as a small retreat from social visibility, its sheltered destinations contrasting with the exposed public failure of the examination.

The final break comes on one such placid trip in the Große Breite. Hermann switches off the outboard and lets the boat drift for more than an hour. When he tries to restart it, the engine only sputters. Even lifting the cover to inspect the motor is, for him, a technical achievement, but staring into it does not solve the problem. On a final attempt he pulls the starter cord in anger and at an awkward angle. The cord strikes the narrator in the face, sending him overboard with a bloody nose and leaving him dazed in his life jacket.

Hermann first gestures and calls for help from the boat, then jumps into the water after his son. The boat, pushed away by his leap, begins to drift off; a nearby couple reaches the narrator with strong arms and pulls him from the water before Hermann can reach him. Hermann swims and paddles to the rescuers’ boat, climbs aboard in soaked clothes, and embraces his son so tightly that the boy coughs. The rescue makes the boat’s advertised assurance of unsinkability beside the point: the danger arises not from a storm but from a failed motor, an uncontrolled pull, and the distance opening between father and child.

Secrecy and what the boat leaves behind

The rescuers help find JoMaHe in the reeds and tow it back. At the Schleswiger Schlei-Segel-Club, a crowd greets the pair, and the story circulates among local sailors: the professor knocked his son overboard, became stranded in calm weather, and had to be rescued, all without a sailing certificate. On the way home Hermann asks the narrator to keep the incident secret for that evening. Although the family wants to know why the boy has blood-soaked cotton plugs in his nose, he lies, saying he ran into the mast. Hermann nods gratefully.

The lie briefly protects Hermann from the public story already forming around him, but it also makes the son a custodian of the father’s humiliation. After the accident Hermann never boards JoMaHe again. The boat therefore gathers the stages of his sailing ambition into one object: the imagined escape from land, the club berth secured before any sailing experience, the name devised by the family, the practical defeat, the calm-water pleasures, and finally the accident that ends the pursuit. The next turn in the narrative is away from the sea: after this nautical defeat, Hermann withdraws his affection from the water and turns his attention to the land.